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itwbennett (1594911) writes "Oppo Electronics has taken off the wraps on its first LTE phone, and it packs more technology than most if not all laptops. The Find 7 is a 5.5" phone and is the first to support 2560 x 1440 resolution [538 PPI] (by comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S5 has 441 PPI). 'Another striking and unique feature of the phone is its 2.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor,' writes blogger Andy Patrizio. 'This is Qualcomm's first chip to feature its Gobi True 4G LTE World Mode, supporting LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA, CDMA1x, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM4. Translation: this phone will work on LTE all over the world.'"

It seems current phones like the two mentioned in TFS are approximately the same resolution as our vision. For an adult human, 400-600 is about the limit of what we can detect.

I guess screen resolution is now at the point cameras have been for a few years - any resolution higher than about 4 megapixels is wasted unless the photo is enlarged considerably. (Or one portion is enlarged aka "zoomed in").

Speaking as a graphic designer with over two decades of experience, there is a reason that graphic designers have always targeted a print resolution of 300 dpi for colour images.

How 400-600 entered the conversation is beyond me. The percentage of people who can visually tell the difference between a 300 dpi output and anything higher than that is very, very small. The number of people who can spot the difference at 400+ is not even a consideration for discussion. I'm sure there are some who can but don't even vaguely think that they in any way represent the norm.

Any manufacturer who targets a screen resolution above about 350 or so is just targeting big numbers for the marketing benefit - the average user will never be able to tell the difference.

Sometimes people use their phones closer than 1' from their eyes, especially when trying to see detail (i.e. the times when high resolution helps). With that said, I really don't see any use for 538PPI. That thing has the resolution of my 27" monitor! Yeah, I'd like the monitor's resolution to be higher, I guess, but it's not needed. Meanwhile, that's 4x the resolution of my still-somewhat-large (4.8") phone. Now, I *would* like the phone's resolution to be a bit higher (it's just over 300PPI, but text vanishes into jumbled pixels before it gets too small to read) but most of the time I don't need it and probably wouldn't notice... aside from the higher power draw and worse framerates in games.

It's an aside point, but I don't think OpenGL games render in 1920x1080 on phones with that resolution, based on what I can tell by looking at my Nexus 5 it looks like games render in a much lower resolution and use FSAA and other filtering to smooth out the artifacts.

I don't think having a higher res screen would slow down games much, unless the game you're playing chooses it's rendering res based on the screen res rather than on how powerful the GPU is.

While 538PPI might be a bit overkill on a classical phone, those same screens are also used in the latest round of virtual reality headsets and they have still a long way to go before they get anywhere near human vision limits. And to go even further, Nvidia has demoed some microlens lightfield glasses a while a go and those need even more resolution then a classical headset display and who knows, if resolution keeps growing, having a lightfield display in your phone might actually start to become viable (

It is the pixel angle that makes the difference. 300DPI at two feet away is not the same as 300DPI at six inches. Whether you can see the difference in resolutions has a great deal to do with how you use a device, and how far away you hold it. Print media typically expects to be viewed at arm's length -- about 18 inches. I see many, many people holding their cell phones far closer than that.

I must be some of those lucky super-humans then because I can clearly see a difference between my old Galaxy S3 (305 PPI) and Nexus 5 (445 PPI). I wear glasses and think I need to go get a new prescription soon, BTW.

Your experience as a graphic designer has mislead you. What you say might be true for print, but not for LCD/AMOLED screens. That's why ePaper displays often have relatively low PPIs but still look like paper - they have real ink blobs in them. It's to do with the slightly fuzzy edges of the spots in print, the slight bleed into the paper etc. smoothing the printed image out. Screens have hard edges to every pixel.

The human eye does not work the way a lot of people seem to think it does. 300 DPI is not some kind of ultimate limit, and printer manufacturers know this which is why they usually interpolate up to at least 600 DPI and most people can tell that it looks better for small text.

I must be some of those lucky super-humans then because I can clearly see a difference between my old Galaxy S3 (305 PPI) and Nexus 5 (445 PPI).

I wonder if that has anything to do with PenTile, the odd way they count "pixels", and color fringing around text. Maybe when an RGBG quad is considered 2 pixels, you need twice as many (at least in one axis) for text to have a really clean appearance.

300dpi for print is actually a lot lower than 300ppi for displays. Each dot for print is, depending on your technology, either black, cyan, magenta or yellow, or one of a very small (typically 4-16) shades of these colours. For a display, you have at least 2^16 shades of colour for each pixel. This is why the output from a 300dpi inkjet looks a lot worse than a 70dpi monitor. For print, you typically use 2400dpi, which comes close to approximating 300ppi.

300dpi for print is actually a lot lower than 300ppi for displays. Each dot for print is, depending on your technology, either black, cyan, magenta or yellow, or one of a very small (typically 4-16) shades of these colours.

You are confusing DPI (image resolution) and LPI (effectively printer resolution). They are not the same thing.

If you look a black and white print, there is no dithering and 600dpi is still clearly better than 300dpi. Try looking at printed text for instance. There is no visual improvement at 1200dpi or higher though, that only matters for dithering as you say.

You're talking about desktop grade printer resolution which is not the same as commercial grade printer resolution (measured in LPI - lines per inch) and neither are the same as image resolution (DPI) which is a totally different thing.

Doesn't really matter to the argument that because of ink absorption causing blurring, and the fact that most people using phones are doing so at 1/3-1/4 the distance of looking at printed images, that your comparison of PPI on phone screens and image DPI that will be used in high LPI printers really isn't equivalent or analogous at all.

image resolution is measured in Pixels Per Inch (PPI) not DPI. Feel free to open any image authoring package to confirm this. DPI is Dots Per Inch. Dots are something bubble jet printers drop onto a sheet of paper and haven't nothing to do with the size of the pixel currently being printed. You did get the LPI bit right though.

Speaking as a graphic designer with over two decades of experience, there is a reason that graphic designers have always targeted a print resolution of 300 dpi for colour images.

How 400-600 entered the conversation is beyond me. The percentage of people who can visually tell the difference between a 300 dpi output and anything higher than that is very, very small. The number of people who can spot the difference at 400+ is not even a consideration for discussion.

When I was a graphic designer, I was told 300 dpi --- unless the image had type, in which case, 600. I've found some corroboration:

The rule of thumb is 300 dpi for colour images, 600 dpi for greyscale, and 1200 dpi for bitmap. The less information per dot means more dots per inch are required to maintain the same effective resolution.

A monitor two feet away with a 300dpi image has roughly the same angular resolution as a phone one foot away.

If that doesn't make sense intuitively, think of a billboard made up of 1/4 dots - from 50 feet away, it won't look pixelated. Compare looking at the same billboard from 1 foot away - the pixelation will be obvious.

To convert accurately requires geometry that I don't feel like thinking about right now, but you get the point - the closer the viewer, the more easily they can detect pixelation, so you

That is false. You are thinking old people, who with time lose ability to hear higher frequency sounds. Average adults can often hear higher frequencies, and young people can hear even higher ones.

I still remember a case of walking around a certain field in the countryside with an old relative and he was complaining about the fact that there used to be a lot of grasshoppers in this place and now the environmental pollution killed them all since it's all quiet. At the same time, grasshopper noises where everywhere. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it's just his age and his reduced ability to hear higher frequency sounds.

Few adults can hear sounds above 18kHz. I remember making tone generators in Pascal as a kid, beeping out audible 22kHz notes that my older brother and my dad couldn't hear. Later on, I'd try similar programs on my mobile phone, but the damn device couldn't generate tones above 16.5kHz. Poor hardware, I thought, until I tried it on my 16 years old nephew.

48khz (up to 24khz effective) has been around at least as long as DAT. 24-bit 96khz has been around at least as long as DVD's. Then you have the SA-CD format, which is only 1-bit depth but in the mhz range, and now 192khz audio is starting to reach consumer-level devices and even 384 in studios I believe. Working with music, I can't imagine needing something better than 24-bit, because already my limitation is with the microphone, recording equipment, and playback speakers. I haven't tried 192khz+ yet but i

It's interesting the question said "producing" and the things you mentioned are preproduction.

Also, a 48 kHz sample rate cannot try to APPROXIMATE a tone higher than 22kHz. At 22kHz, it's a square wave. That's nowhere NEAR accurately reproducing a 22kHz tone. A sample rate of 48 will represent a 12kHz tone with some accuracy. Look at the wave form to see what I mean.

At playback, capacitance and physical momentum will round off the corners of a square wave pretty much randomly, while filters can guess that it might be a pure, single tone - a sinusoidal wave (or make some other guess). The recording, the digital file IS sample-and-hold. There is one value per sample.

Starting with the set of squared waves in the recording, then guessing which of many sounds is represented by that sample, will produce _A_ sound. Guessing A sound is not reproducing the original sound. He

Nobody (or nearly nobody) is doing or wants 384khz in studios. 192khz is next to non-existant as well and it gets pretty heated in the forums when people discuss whether there's any benefit to 192 over 96 and it usually comes down to "it's good if your equipment supports it because it will be more accurate at lower sample rates". Some tracking engineers will record at 88 or 96, but it's usually 48k. The tradeoff between disk space and sound quality for higher sample rates just isn't attractive. When you hav

This is a stupid race for the higher number. Unfortunately they will find people that buy this thing because of this completely meaningless "feature". Unless people start carrying around large magnifiers, this will not even be visible in direct comparison.

It is ridiculous to put a such a high resolution display on a tiny screen. I just recently upgraded from a 720 Nexus 4 to a 1080 Nexus 5. I have great vision and side-by-side, I can't tell the difference between the two screens for fine text or pictures. While this phone is a great value, the battery life is terrible and the games run no better than their predecessor. If I had a choice, I'd much rather have the N5 with my old N4's 720p screen.

I hear you. LG's G2 is pretty much the same device as the nexus 5 but has a ~25% larger battery to accomodate the humongous display. It seems that pretty much the only companies not shooting for the highest specs possible today are Apple and Motorola, and they are both making pretty solid devices nevertheless. I also own a Nexus 4, and I'll hold out on upgrading until I see a Moto X2 or something like that. In fact, I was thinking about "upgrading" to a less powerful phone, like the Moto G, because shit, my

Second this. It feels like the number race of PC's of years ago: "This one has more pixels", "This one more GHz", "This one more MBs". But nobody seem to care about more autonomy.

Did they bring in all the marketing guys from the 90s? I guess is what all those tech reviews with meaningless astroturfing performance tests have given us. "Hey this phone can decode and re encode 4k videos on the fly! while you play angry birds!" WHO CARES if it's going to get hot as hell and die in 1.5 hours?

I'll reserve judgement until I have seen it, because I'm one of those freaks who can tell the difference between 1080p and 4k, but I do tend to agree with you. 1080p on a screen that small looks fantastic and adding more pixels would just seem to be wasting GPU power (although games could use 1080p and simply scale up). I'm not ruling out that it looks nice though, as again I'm one of those people who can see the ugly anti-aliasing on iPad "retina" displays, so maybe this will finally be like a real printed

And more power used by the screen. Powering the screen and its backlight are over half the battery consumption in any smartphone, and it's only more power hungry with more pixels. Even the backlight has to work harder.

Perhaps so in regards to the PPI of the display, however the 4G / LTE features discussed in the summary are quite impressive, a proper worldphone.

Also, sooner or later, we'll reach a point where the PPI doesn't need to increase, I'd hazard a guess that 450+ PPI is going to be completely exceptional. I doubt you're going to see them focusing on going much higher than what this one has attained.

After Apples "Retna" display DPI their isn't much of a reason to go much higher. For conventional displays.

That said I am not saying we shouldn't be making higher res displays. But the application of the technology should go to different areas. Such as smaller projectors.

I have an old iPhone 4. And the display is as sharp as any of the newer phones.What they need to focus more on now is speed,battery life and if you are going to make the GPU better we need more 3d acceleration features. But we don't need t

God dammit when will these resolutions be available on normal-sized desktop screens? If they can pack 2560x1440 into a 5" screen for $600, why does it have to cost more than that to get any desktop monitor with that many pixels? It shouldn't have to be 27". All kinds of laptop screens are racing towards 4K-like resolutions, but you simply cannot get the same 3200x1800 resolution at any size on the desktop you can in 14" laptops. At least until you get to 4K TVs.

Flat panel screens have the same yield issues as ICs (the process for creating them is vaguely similar). If you go from a 4" screen to a 8" screen, you quadruple the area, which quadruples the chance that there'll be a manufacturing error that will result in a dead / stuck pixel. This means that your yield drops by a factor of four.

Eventually, some one will figure out a way of creating really big panels and then cutting them to size, and then we'll have a large variety of screen sizes depending on wher

If you go from a 4" screen to an 8" screen, with the same number of pixels, your yield will *not* drop by a factor of four. A lower DPI screen is less likely to have defects. I'm not sure exactly how much it might drop though, or if the yield might even increase.

There are already laptops which pack 1920x1080 and even 2560x1440 resolution into a 13.3" screen. However desktop operating systems do not have very good DPI scaling yet, so that kind of machines are quite painful to use.

Okay, what about battery? Does it last a few weeks on a charge like a good old Nokia? If not, why not? Why this incessant focus on processing power? Having to charge my phone daily (or more frequently!) is where the pain is if you ask me.

Yeah plugging it in at night and unplugging it in the morning is a real pain huh?
It doesn't last as long as an old Nokia because it consumes more power and battery capacity is restrained by physical density, size, and cost.
C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone. If you'd rather trade off all those features fo

C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone.

I didn't study technology because I wanted to be satisfied with the status quo. Right now, you cannot eat your cake and still have it, but what if you could?

I upgraded my phone because I wanted greater functionality. (Actually, I upgraded because I wanted the very cheap monthly plans on Republic Wireless. [republicwireless.com]) I now have to plug my phone in every night instead of two to three times a week. The Moto X already has compromised specs to get very good battery life, and I only ran out of battery once after doing a 2-

What about trips to the cabin, hiking, hunting, fishing, camping with the scouts, etc?. As a scout leader I need my phone on during outings in case of emergency (either with us or from home) and having my phone only last 24 hours is simply not an option.

What about trips to the cabin, hiking, hunting, fishing, camping with the scouts, etc?. As a scout leader I need my phone on during outings in case of emergency (either with us or from home) and having my phone only last 24 hours is simply not an option.

Then get a different phone. No one said that everyone needed to have the same phone. I need a phone for taking videos several times a week, and uploading them to other people. I also tether to it for my primary non-work internet connection. I don't have a cabin. I don't have scouts to go camping with. Some places hiking and fishing do not require multi-day trips beyond "the grid". I live in a major European capital city -- rent is high enough that I can't afford to be elsewhere very often. Does not mean that I need pity from thatkid_2002 or anybody else.

But if you're trying to get rid of that cabin for free, just let me know.

The good thing about basic phones is that they were perfected years ago, so they're cheap now. If off grid emergency use is important, buy a Nokia 1100 and it'll last you a week - a couple of cheap batteries can easily extend that to a month, or a portable solar panel will make it indefinite.

The emergence of power-guzzling pocket computers doesn't mean that the basic, long life, $30 phones don't exist any more, it just means they aren't getting headlines.

I should hope the scout leader doesn't need the phone to play Angry Birds during the camping trip. If it is for the sole reason stated - emergencies - then having contact with the rest of the world is a very important safety precaution. Just because it didn't exist before doesn't mean it should be foregone. Emergency communication can save your life in situations where before cell phones the rescue teams would find corpses by the time they knew to look.

I bring a 12 volt battery camping, 35 amp hours with 4 cigarette plugs available (30amp fuse on the main, 10 amps for each plug) in a marine battery case. I can power phone chargers, a laptop (using a 12 volt power cord, pretty efficient), fans, a bug zapper, and even an electric blanket (4 amps per hour, but auto-off after 30 minutes so it's only a 2 amp draw). I also have a quality 800/1600 watt inverter which can power most things I may bring except power tools (works great for charging power tool batte

I do a lot of hiking / camping both out in the bush and country as well as on sandy islands with no power source. Here's a few tips:

a) If you only need your phone for emergencies then don't turn it on. It'll last your the entire trip.b) If you only need to receive calls too then disabled 3G/4G/LTE. That will buy you about 1-2 days of additional battery life.c) Disable any apps that you would normally use when not camping. Background applications use a lot of idle charge.d) If you're out of coverage then tur

What about trips to the cabin, hiking, hunting, fishing, camping with the scouts, etc?. As a scout leader I need my phone on during outings in case of emergency (either with us or from home) and having my phone only last 24 hours is simply not an option.

Says the "Survivor"...Damn, I'm still laughing over the whining here and the irony of your name.

Sorry, but this read exactly like a script line for the Kardashians Go Camping. I mean damn, what in the hell do you actually do in the woods to deal with emergencies before cell phones came about? Ever think to teach scouts some REAL world experience that they'll need in the future, such as what to do when you do not have a cell phone available?

Really? Like most people I work 5 days a week and I'm surrounded by chargers. I am mostly wireless but if I needed to I could charge via cable at work. My car has a wireless charger. It's really no big deal, especially considering all the benefits I get from having a Nexus 5 instead of a Nokia dumbphone.

Or you know you could just turn those features that suck power off. When I'm abroad I usually turn off data transfer, if I also don't use it for games or the GPS tracker or any of the other power hungry uses and limit it to being a call/text only dumb phone then it lasts ages on a single charge. And if that's still not enough, get a Powerstation XL [mophie.com] and plug it in when and where you do sleep.

Lol I wish smartphones lasted 15-20 hours with normal use, or maybe it does if I don't use it for 15 hours? I'm sorry but I bought this thing to actually use it. When it can play a game and run gps software for 20 hours straight then I will be happy, until then the batteries suck. Maybe that's why nokia brick phones lasted so long, no gps or clash of clans to suck the battery dry in a few hours.

If a manufacturer proposed an average (dual core - last year's model is fine, 1GB RAM, 800x480 screen) phone that was affordable (no, really, $500 isn't affordable) with a big ass battery I would be like SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

I don't understand all these designers who are pushing devices *waaaay* past the capabilities of the batteries. Smart watches (other than the Pebble, they did it right!) are doing exactly this and it is making their product a complete joke.

Get yourself a Moto G - the battery is good (although not astonishing: 1-2 days, rather than "oh shit, running out at 6pm"), the build quality and specs are excellent for normal usage (web, general communication), and they're dirt cheap compared to the competition.

My requirements for battery life might be less than others. I only care about getting through a day. It should also be mentioned that it has rapid charging technology. They are alleging you can charge 75% of the battery in 30-minutes. If that's true it's sounds like a decent compromise to me.

Fortunately, Oppo listened to the feedback from people who saw the Find 5, and wisely gave it a removable battery (as well as LTE and microSD). So, you'll be able to buy a nice, big, beefy 6,000-8000mAH+ aftermarket battery for it. Or buy a half-dozen spare regular batteries from someone on eBay, and swap them out as needed throughout the day and night.

Okay, what about battery? Does it last a few weeks on a charge like a good old Nokia? If not, why not? Why this incessant focus on processing power? Having to charge my phone daily (or more frequently!) is where the pain is if you ask me.

How many people do you know today that do NOT charge their cell phone nightly, regardless of battery type or strength?

Yeah, I thought so.

Basically everyone I know does this. And I have a feeling manufacturers have basically given up on battery life because of this shift in mentality.

Regardless of battery type, design, or claims to last weeks, we're basically ALL in this same situation within 6 months of owning any new cell phone. Charging nightly now is the only way I am all but guaranteed to not run out

I know I charged my StarTAC nightly (IIRC, I had two batteries and the morning routine was to swap the spare into the phone). The early digitals I had after that weren't great, either, and I seem to remember buying the "extended" batteries for them, too. as well as always charging them over night.

I don't really think my iPhone 5s is really that bad in terms of standby or even talk time battery performance. Maybe it is just "overnight charge"

I know I charged my StarTAC nightly (IIRC, I had two batteries and the morning routine was to swap the spare into the phone). The early digitals I had after that weren't great, either, and I seem to remember buying the "extended" batteries for them, too. as well as always charging them over night.

I don't really think my iPhone 5s is really that bad in terms of standby or even talk time battery performance. Maybe it is just "overnight charge" mental conditioning but I feel pretty good about 12 hours of light usage during the day and having 50%-ish battery left. I'm in the car a lot, and a ProClip holder with a charge cable/aux-in setup is as much about ease of use (making/taking calls, aux-in audio, not losing the damn thing between seats) as it is "needing" to charge it.

But then again, I've always been an "overnight" charging/fresh batteries every day mentality since the 1980s using NICADs and NiMH AAs with cassette Walkmen. Always owned at least for rechargeable cells, always swapped fresh cells into the Walkman every morning and put yesterday's into the charger.

I was specifically talking about flip phones of today, the one area within the cell industry that was actually able to take advantage of newer battery tech to offer real battery life without having to sacrifice it for 273 features we didn't want or ask for. Unfortunately, demand will make them obsolete.

And your mentality since the 1980s only further concretes my point about user mentality towards charging. This is why battery specs will likely remain static. People don't care anymore about multi-day batt

Most smartphones can last as long as an old Nokia, just turn mobile data / wifi off and don't use much screen time. Seriously without it constantly downloading emails in the background they last for ever.

Most smartphones can last as long as an old Nokia, just turn mobile data / wifi off and don't use much screen time. Seriously without it constantly downloading emails in the background they last for ever.

In other words, turn your "smart" phone back into a "dumb" Nokia, and it'll run just as long.

Unfortunately, for those addicted to [random social media du jour app], being offline for more than 45 seconds isn't an option.

Because modern webapps depend on Javascript for everything, and Javascript completely sucks on most current mobile platforms. Like it or not, a webapp that uses Javascript to render itself into an empty [body/] tag's DOM needs a metric shit ton of ram and a fast, multi-core CPU. Unfortunately, that description now includes a large plurality of the web sites that we use today.

The solution isn't to make our phones slow and laggy to maximize battery life. The

> My Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini gets around three days stand-by with light to medium use..

ROFLMAO. How the other half lives...

I've managed to wring my Galaxy S3's stock battery dry in about 2 hours, and would estimate that my ~3,000mAH Seidio extended battery is good for about 5 hours of really hardcore use (though it usually doesn't fall below 10% until an hour or two before I'm ready to go to bed).

Admittedly, part of the reason my battery life is so bad is because I have zero tolerance for touch-latency o

I am kind of surprised to see that the majority of posts are railing against this phone, mostly over the display resolution being so high. I'm thinking most people never made it past the summary. On top of what the summary lists, it has 3 gigabytes of ram, 32 gigabytes of internal storage, micro SD that can handle 128 gigabyte cards, 5 megapixel front facing camera, 50 (sorta) megapixel rear camera, 3000mAh removable battery. Rapid charging technology - going from 0 to 75% charge on a 3000mAh battery is pretty sweet.

At a $599 retail price point? That's pretty remarkable. The only thing the article does not discuss in the graphics chip set but I'm willing to bet it's nothing to sneeze at.

Those are fine specs, but they get less impressive in a monstrously large phone like this one. After all, even a very small laptop would blow this away for both storage and performance and I doubt that this would fit comfortably in a pocket.

You would doubt incorrectly. As someone who hangs out with a lot of people who have jumped on the "phablet" bandwagon, there are much larger phones that comfortably fit into pockets. Even your typical skinny jeans holds a Galaxy Note II without issue.

I am kind of surprised to see that the majority of posts are railing against this phone, mostly over the display resolution being so high. I'm thinking most people never made it past the summary. On top of what the summary lists, it has 3 gigabytes of ram, 32 gigabytes of internal storage, micro SD that can handle 128 gigabyte cards, 5 megapixel front facing camera, 50 (sorta) megapixel rear camera, 3000mAh removable battery. Rapid charging technology - going from 0 to 75% charge on a 3000mAh battery is pretty sweet.

At a $599 retail price point? That's pretty remarkable. The only thing the article does not discuss in the graphics chip set but I'm willing to bet it's nothing to sneeze at.

There were no pictures of the thing in the TFA and no easily visible links so in case anybody wants to know what the thing looks like:

DK1 is cool as a prototype, but the lack of positioning gets annoying at times, and the resolution is horrible.

DK2 fixes that, but it sounds like the resolution still needs improving.

This is the kind of thing I'd love to have in there. The Rift as it stands right now won't work well with many UIs, as it's too low res to render the details, and it seriously breaks immersion to see things pixellated.

So the more the better I say, if it's overkill for a phone then there are other uses

Now slap a friggin' hardware keyboard on it and we'll talk. What's the point of yet another stupid buttonless bar phone? It's got a lot of pixels and a big fat processor so it has miserable battery life and absolutely zero usability improvement. It's like putting a solid gold screen door on a submarine, then. Put a Wacom style digitizer on the thing like the Galaxy Note while you're at it, please, so we can accurately poke at hilariously tiny controls and icons on the screen. I don't care if doing so makes the damn phone.0005" thicker or whatever.

Am I the only one who's noticed that our culture has seemingly started to revolve around SMS and Twitter yet somehow at the exact same time everybody started dropping keyboards off of phones? What's the deal with that?

I think it's a conspiracy. (Okay, okay, so the only 'conspiracy' is copycattingthe buttonless design popularized with -- but not invented by -- the iPhone. But still.)

Show some cojones! Have the courage to do something different for a change. I'd love a phone with a billion and three pixels available on the display, but I'd also like a phone that I can actually type on, select things, draw on it, etc. with all those pixels. If all you're doing is tapping and sliding and swiping and poking ineffectually at a million-pixel-wide but only physically 2-inches-across virtual keyboard the damn thing may as well be 320x240.

While a screen with decent resolution is nice, I really need (not want -- NEED) a phone with good vocal quality and zero latency on the voice side. Show me a phone, encoding scheme, network and carrier with _that_ and I'll sign a life membership.
I have googled my pants off for "cell phone voice latency" test results with no meaningful hits. The conspiracy-theorist part of me says the cell phone mfgrs & carriers all know how horrible they are when compared to landline so they've agreed to not test or not alert the consumer to this measurement.

Zero latency is impossible due to both the speed of sound in air and the speed of light (which indirectly governs the speed of information-conveyance by electrons over a wire. For the sake of being pedantic, the actual electrons travel along the wire at a relatively slow speed).

Imperceptible latency is impossible with anything besides analog modulation schemes like FM, or uncompressed PCM. By the very definition of stream and block compression, you have to buffer SOMETHING.

Yep. My next phone is going to be the simplest phone I can get with tethering. If I want a mobile computer, I'll use my tablet or laptop. I want a phone I don't have to worry about, and that has a battery that lasts more than 16 hours.

I'd go even further. Because of this focus on amount of pixels rather than quality, we're not getting quality content. Modern mobile GPUs could probably push PS3/XB360 quality graphics at 480-720p. We could have had a controller-like phone holder and play previous gen console games on the phones if not for this fetish.

Instead all you get is crap like angry birds, flappy bird and so on. Deus Ex game mobile game was so terrible, it wasn't even funny, and it really, REALLY tried to push the envelope as much as

If it wasn't for the semi-crippled OS, I'd agree. Android with traditional PC peripherals isn't a great experience, either in terms of the OS (things like full-screen-only apps and a swipe-oriented UI) or apps (relatively small finger movements on a touchscreen translate to significant mouse movements on a big display, and many apps will have very poor support for non-touch input).

On the other hand, simply in terms of the hardware, this thing is a more-than-adequate replacement for a PC. Even given the diff

I'd love to see Thunderbolt connections on phones. The connector is just about small enough for a phone and provides DisplayPort and enough PCIe bandwidth for a disk controller and a USB hub. Perhaps someone could come up with a connector that was slightly thinner (and wider) and contained Thunderbolt and power.